For as long as people have been telling stories to other people, the debate has raged about what’s more important in a good novel: plot or characters? Indeed, you can’t have a good story if the characters don’t have unusual, adventurous, romantic, or dangerous things to do. But I think those unusual, adventurous, romantic, and dangerous activities usually fade quickly into the recesses of our minds while the characters who act out those plots are remembered long after. In some cases, they grow into characters so memorable, so human, so us-like or not, they stay in our thoughts long after the stories they acted out are forgotten. 

We all have different lists of unforgettable characters. Some – think Scarlet O’Hara and Rett Butler, for example – are strongly reinforced in our minds and given physical presence by their movie appearances. And that’s fine because they possess compelling characteristics. In book form, Tom Joad and his family; The Grapes of Wrath (also a great movie), Garp; The World According to Garp; Holden Canfield, Catcher in the Rye; Ahab, Moby Dick; Mr. Kurtz, Heart of Darkness, all come quickly to my mind.

If writers knew the secret ingredient that makes a character memorable, there would not be enough room on Best-Seller lists for all the books containing them.

It seems to me many books being published today contain no memorable characters and often contain characters we all quickly forget or would like to forget. To my mind, the reason for that is because authors seem driven to produce unbelievable plots with bizarre characters to gain headlines, Best-Seller status, and movie contracts. Maybe that’s okay, too, but it isn’t the way I write.

I believe the keyword to creating memorable characters is empathy. That’s the little bell that chimes inside our heads or hearts that tells us, “I get him or her. He or she is like me in this particular way. I can see myself in the same situation, what would I do? Or I admire him/her” He or she may be doing the most outlandish things, things we will likely never do, but still, the synapse of understanding, of commonality, is triggered in our minds.

Character empathy has to start between writer and character. If the writer doesn’t invest time trying to understand, truly understand, the characters he or she has created, the reader will never relate to that character. Again, too many writers today craft characters without spending the time to understand them. They come across as wooden, unreal, or worse, superheroes.

I devote a great amount of time, both before and during the writing of one of my novels, to understanding my characters. I spend a lot of time meditation on those fictitious people and occasionally have correspondence back and forth with them—no kidding. I pay close attention to what my characters are telling me. More often than I care to admit, I’ve had to revise scenes and endings of my novels because my characters insisted they would not do what I had written them doing or saying. For an example of hard-to-forget characters read my novel Delfina’s Gold and let me know what you think of Will Thornton and Delfina de Alba. Let me know your most memorable characters, too.